Fundamental Differences
by When In Doubt Smile
Summary: In the end it's his faith that finally tips the scale in favor of everything Esme has been saying.


p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"In the end it's his faith that finally tips the scale in favor of everything Esme has been saying. It's not the laughing, joyous people, playing on their phones and texting loved ones that they're heading home from a convention that hates her simply because of a small piece of her genetic code. It's not the baby or her time in Sentinel Services. It started long before that. /span/p  
p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"She remembered the first time she saw him with his rosary. It was 2:00 am and the beginning of day four of Lorna being unable to find the will to leave her bed and he had been on edge the whole time, something she'd noticed despite his attempts to hide it. She had felt so bad for him. He wasn't sure what to do. He wasn't unused to dark times or days where everything seems hopeless but he was visibly shaken by her inability to muster the energy to move and that the only thing keeping her from just letting it all go was that it would require her to get out of bed. He tried so hard to hide it all and to the casual observer he probably would have seemed to have a good handle on the whole situation. That is until she started playing with one of her nearby knives, launching it up in the air and then bringing it down quickly and stopping it an inch or two from her vulnerable flesh. The first time she did it he jumped up and was moving towards her before he realized that the knife hadn't actually touched her. /span/p  
p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"Lorna always suspected that it was that incident that drove him to hushed prayers in Spanish at such an early hour of the morning. They'd only been dating for a couple months at that point and her depression was hard enough for medical professionals who had known her for years to handle, nevermind a new boyfriend. His whispers were too quiet for her to even hope to be able to pick out any of the words, though it wouldn't have meant much anyway seeing as the language was a complete mystery to her at that point. But she listened to him as he went through prayer after prayer after prayer and fell asleep to his voice ebbing and flowing and guiding her to an imaginary world where everything hurt less and the saints he believed existed (and that she hoped didn't because what good were saints if children were suffering in the streets) watched over them all. /span/p  
p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"The faith he showed that night quickly became a hallmark of their relationship. She doubted that they could trust a human who offered help. He lobbied that it was worth a shot. He was hopeful that a new pro-mutant bill might give them a better chance at life. She tried her best (and failed) to not snort. He continued to believe that they were actually making a change. She couldn't bring herself to see how their simple struggle to just make it another 24 hours qualified as making a change. And that's how she found herself standing there, ready to take destroy a plane as he begged her to muster just enough faith to not do what she had always known deep down she would. /span/p  
p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"Lorna remembers quite clearly the day she stopped having faith. It was a manic day, which she always thought would surprise people if they knew. People expect results like that to come from dark days, not ones where your brain goes faster than your mouth can form the words and your hands shake uncontrollably and the world seems like your plaything. But that's where she was when she proposed the plan that got four mutants killed. There was Elodie, 32, who could change her appearance and was shot in the head by a Sentinel Services agent. Then Ryan, 28, who had superspeed and he ran straight into a net and was trapped like the animals the agents treated them like. Then Susan, 17, telepath and dead from a fist fight she wasn't ready for. And, finally, little Elle, 10, who shouldn't have been there at all but Lorna thought she would just slip in, freeze the gate so that Ryan could run through it without making as much noise and then she would be back in the truck with the rest of the Underground. No one knows what happened to her. They suspect she's dead, but Lorna figure she will die not knowing. Her manic mind had thought the mission was completely possible and was just convincing and motivational enough to get them all to agree. It wasn't enough to save them from what she now recognizes as a suicide mission and it wasn't enough to rescue her faith from the reality that followed the deaths and her failure. After all, if your faith can't survive days where you feel you can conquer the world, does it truly have a place at all? At least, that was Lorna's logic. /span/p  
p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"Marcos' was always very different. He claimed that you had to have faith if you wanted to keep going. That without faith there wasn't a point to any of this. And some days Lorna sees his point. But not today, with a plane full of people who hated her unborn child simply because of its genetics flying overhead. And not tomorrow when she knows this will all sink in. And not the day after that or the one after that because this one choice will brand her for life and destroy any faith she could ever hope to get back. Lorna looks at the tears in Marcos' eyes and can't imagine a world in which he could ever have faith in her again. How could he? He believed in so much, in the inherent goodness of men, in the depths of compassion he believed he could tap, in the laughter he was certain would follow these dark days. And that was why she was doing this. She had to take these steps because his faith, the faith that made Marcos Marcos, the faith that shone in his eyes that she loved so much, would never let him do the horrible things that needed to be done so that tomorrow could dawn on a better world for their little family. And that's why she was going to do them. /span/p  
p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"In the new world she was trying so desperately to carve out of the old one there wouldn't be a need for Marcos' faith, she hoped. She thought a silent prayer to his angels and saints and God that instead her own determination to protect Marcos' faith would be enough for all three of them. /span/p 


End file.
